- the 9th International Workshop on Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems (WWV 2013,http://www.dsic.upv.es/~jsilva/wwv2013/), which took place on June 2013 in Firenze, as part of the International Federated Conferences on Distributed Computing Techniques (DisCoTec 2013).

This is however an open call for papers, therefore both participants of the workshops and other authors are encouraged to submit contributions.

The aim of this special issue is to provide an interdisciplinary forum to facilitate the cross-fertilization and the advancement of hybrid methods that exploit concepts and tools drawn from Rule-based programming, Software engineering, Formal methods and Web-oriented research.

Nowadays, many companies and institutions have diverted their Web sites into interactive, completely-automated, Web-based applications for, e.g., e-business, e-learning, e-government and e-health. The increased complexity and the explosive growth of Web systems have made their design and implementation a challenging task. Systematic, formal approaches to their specification and verification can permit to address the problems of this specific domain by means of automated and effective techniques and tools.

We solicit original papers on topics of either theoretical or applied interest, which include, but are not limited to:

- Middleware and frameworks for composition and orchestration of Web services.

- Web quality and Web metrics.

- Web usability and accessibility.

- Testing and evaluation of Web systems and applications.

SUBMISSION

We expect original articles (typically 20-30 pages; submission of larger papers will be evaluated depending on editorial constraints) that present high-quality contributions that have not been previously published in another journal and that must not be simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. Each paper will undergo a thorough evaluation by at least two reviewers. The authors will have about 50 days to incorporate the comments of the reviewers and submit a revised version of their papers, which will be evaluated again by the reviewers to make a final decision.